NARCOTICS LEGISLATION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1969 U.S. SENATE, SUBCOMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE JUVENILE DELINQUENCY OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY, Washington, D.C. The subcommittee (composed of Senators Dodd, Hart, Bayh, Burdick, Tydings, Kennedy, Hruska, Fong, Thurmond, and Cook) met, pursuant to call at 10 a.m., in room 318, Old Senate Office Building, Hon. Thomas J. Dodd (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Senators Dodd, Kennedy, and Hruska. Also present: Carl L. Perian, staff director; Walter Kenney, Jr., counsel; Eugene W. Gleason, editorial director; William C. Mooney, chief investigator; Peter Freivalds, research director; Bernard Tannenbaum, special counsel; Elizabeth V. DePaulo, staff member; and Richard C. Sheridan, minority counsel. Chairman DODD. I will call this hearing to order. Our purpose in these hearings during the coming weeks will be to consider several legislative proposals that have been referred to this subcommittee and that are designed to control the widespread use of drugs threatening our institutions and our society. The bills before the committee are S. 1895, "The Omnibus Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Control and Addict Rehabilitation Act of 1969," which I introduced in April of this year; S. 2637, "The Controlled Dangerous Substances Act of 1969," which the late Senator Dirksen introduced on behalf of the administration; and S. 2590, introduced by Senator Moss. The gravity of the drug problem in the United States has been established. We certainly do not lack evidence to demonstrate the overwhelming drug menace that confronts our youth. Arrests for narcotic drug law violations in 1968 were over four times as great as arrests in 1960. Narcotic arrests in 1968 rose 64 percent over 1967. And these staggering increases were primarily the result of marihuana arrests. The most recent Federal Bureau of Investigation report shows that on a national basis instances of marihuana violations have almost doubled in the last 2 years. Today I want to emphasize that we need to approach this problem with a great sense of urgency. Despite all of our hearings and all of our laws, the drug statistics have not diminished. Instead they have continued to spiral upwards. It is also becoming obvious that the traffic in both marihuana and narcotic drugs is spreading to age groups and economic levels which were previously drug-free. The increased traffic among college students and young people of middle and upper economic status represents a drastic change in pattern. It is not just heroin, not just marihuana or the stimulants and depressants. It now appears that there are a thousand different drugs that in one combination or another find their way into the hands and heads of our youth. Let me give you a few examples to portray the extent of this tragedy. Forty-four youngsters died last year looking for "kicks" in aerosal spray cans or after inhaling other products such as mouth washes and cleaning fluids. Another case involved parents who had to call the police after being attacked by their own son who was in a drug-crazed condition. The police were forced to shoot and kill the young boy. Another boy was described by his father as "a mad dog" under the influence of drugs. We even have a case of a police chief who had to order the arrest of his own son for selling and possessing dangerous drugs. These and many other cases in our files tell of the grief of parents whose sons and daughters have died from overdoses of drugs. In New York City just in the month of June, 40 teenagers died from an overdose of heroin. There were 730 known heroin deaths in New York in 1968. In 1969, at the rate the addicts are going, it is estimated that 900 will die from overdoses. In America young people under 21 are arrested by the police at the rate of one every 5 minutes in connection with the use, possession or other transaction in drugs. What concerns me the most is that thousands of these people arrested for one drug offense or another are not hardened criminals leading lives of lawbreaking and violence. They are not even the hardened drug addicts that used to be the main problem in the slums and ghettos of our large cities. They are college students, often children of parents who suffer from no lack of opportunity in the economic and educational sense. Quite often they are young people on the road to professional careers as lawyers and teachers. Indeed, today, there are even cases of young school teachers, college professors and ministers being arrested on drug charges. Increasingly, I have felt that these are young people and young adults who have lost all respect, involvement and regard for our way of life and our laws. They have been alienated from their parents, from their Government and from their universities and schools. They have taken a cue from Dr. Timothy Leary, the LSD prophet, and "dropped out." This is a major crisis in our times. But it is a crisis I am convinced that we can overcome. We must. Until it is overcome, however, drug abuse is one way the "alienated" will thumb their noses at organized society, recruit more youths into the drug culture, and generally run disruptive guerrilla skirmishes in our schools, universities and family life. This massive abuse of drugs of all kinds reflects the failure of government, Federal, State and local, to come to grips with the problem. And the failure of Government in handling the problem has served to further alienate our youth. We have failed to apprehend the criminal drug peddlers. We have failed to slow down the drug traffic into and throughout the country. And we have failed to deal responsibly with those who have become victims of the various narcotic and dangerous drugs. Our reaction has often been to do little more than increase the penalties for drug violations. We make new criminals out of a large number of people whose only lawbreaking has been in connection with drug use in response to some personality inadequacy or weakness or disenchantment with the way of life that exists in America today. Having chaired 3 weeks of hearings regarding the gross inadequacies in our correctional and penal institutions, I know that it is a serious mistake to intermingle these drug users in such places of confinement. There, they can only become more criminal, more deviant and more prone to the abuse of drugs. I stress this point based on some new data that I have obtained with respect to drug law violators. One of these is a study of drug arrests in cities, large and small, throughout the Nation. The other is a study of drug offenders in the District of Columbia. Earlier this year this subcommittee surveyed the police departments of 130 major cities to obtain detailed information on drug arrests during the last 5 years. The results, while predictable, were even more startling than we had imagined. We found that in every case where the police departments replied to cur inquiry there had been a substantial increase in drug arrests between 1964 and 1968. The arrest figures in Boston jumped from 149 in 1964 to 1,227 in 1968. In Chicago arrests increased from 2,745 to 7,343. In Los Angeles it went from 5,580 to 14,097. In Philadelphia the arrests rose from 940 to 3,047. Baltimore statistics which are only available for the last 3 years rose from 266 to 790. And drug arrests in New York City increased from 13,529 to 22,429. Rates of increase were as high or higher in other cities. Of the 130 cities questioned, 89 have reported thus far and supplied the committee with statistics generally covering drug arrest trends over a 5-year period. It should be recognized that the cities which did respond represent only a sample of the total drug arrest picture for the Nation. Some of them did not have statistics for one or more of the 5 years covered in the inquiry. Still, this study showed over a quarter of a million drug arrests over the time period covered. The study also showed that the annual drug arrest totals for the cities reporting had increased from 33.124 in 1964 to 85,542 in 1968. Although a substantial majority of these arrests resulted from the abuse of marihuana, our most recent evidence indicates that there is no longer one particular drug responsible for most of the problem. Those who will abuse drugs are prepared to experiment with any drug they can get their hands on. For example, heroin use is growing in the suburbs where it was unknown several years ago. Last year, drug arrests rose 86 percent among young males and 100 percent among females in the suburbs. The suburban communities surrounding the Nation's Capital afforded me a graphic picture of this situation when I prepared an analysis of the increase in drug arrests over the past 3 years. In counties such as Arlington and Fairfax in Virignia and in Prince Georges in Maryland, narcotic arrests are running 100 to 200 percent higher in 1969 than in 1968. In rural areas, such arrests rose 128 percent for males and 87 percent for females. While the magnitude of the problem staggers the imagination, I think we must be most cautious in processing this new legion of drug and narcotic offenders through our present criminal justice system. We must be particularly careful that we do not send too many of them to our so-called "correctional institutions" where it is now obvious they will get worse rather than better. I believe that the thousands of new drug offenders we have identified in this study should make us reevaluate our approach to the drug problem. Our national survey and the study here in the District of Columbia would indicate that most drug arrests do not involve vicious or violent criminals. Particularly, the study in our Nation's Capital does not support the argument that the drug offender is involved in violence. The Metropolitan Police Department provided the subcommittee with the complete police records of 1,003 D.C. offenders who were arrested during 1968 for drug violations, 120 of whom were charged with "other offenses." We found that only seven out of the 1,003 or less than 1 percent of those arrested were additionally charged with crimes of violence. I believe that in view of what we know today there must be an effort to reevaluate our narcotic laws and develop a new national policy on addiction. We must realize that there are basically two kinds of of fenders involved with drugs and narcotics. At one extreme is the professional criminal who viciously pursues the drug trade for profit. At the opposite extreme we find the victims of this criminal. These are the unfortunate people whose emotional disturbance or personality weaknesses forced them to take drugs to escape, expand or distort reality. I submit that the bulk of this second type of offender, even though some of them sell drugs on a small scale, includes sick people who can only benefit from treatment rather than punishment. I believe it is absurd to overload our court machinery with individuals in need of psychiatric help which is unavailable from the court. At the same time, I believe that the full force of the criminal law should be applied to the wide-scale criminal traffickers in narcotics and other dangerous drugs. |